Friday, April 04, 2008

Dead composer Johannes Sebastian Bach is all set to stage a comeback after over 250 years, leaving punsters and quipsmiths everywhere scrambling all over each other in a hurry to use the phrases "He's Bach" and "Bach is back." The famed German musician, who was last seen alive in 1750, announced this decision of his through Whoopi Goldberg yesterday in Hollywood, California. Experts and modern composers are understandably baffled by this decision and many have questioned it.

"Why's he coming back now? His kind of music is so old now." observed leading music composer Anu Malik. "You can't jive to it, you know, just jive. As an expert on the subject, I'm saying, Mr. Bach should reconsider his decision. He has to age gracefully."

"Just look at how Laxmikant-Pyarelal, Kalyanji-Anandji and Shankar-Jaikishen faded away into the sunset." pointed out Malik, ignoring his own stubborn refusal to fade away into the same sunset except for reasons of his own death. Malik, whose sinking musical boat ran afoul of some unusually decent form with 'Refugee,' 'Josh,' 'Fiza' and 'Asoka,' then launched into a sudden, unsolicited rendition of 'Ek garam chai ki pyaali ho' from the Rani Mukerji-Salman Khan starrer 'Har dil jo pyar karega,' punctuated with occasional, alarming bursts of 'Dum dum CHAK! Dum dum CHAK!'

Jaffna local Thilan Dissanayake, when quizzed on the subject, proved surprisingly erudite. "Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, to which he added even in 1744, six years before his death, proves that he still had it in him. He was not a has-been like Pachelbel, who had died by then. We may well see a return to full orchestral music in films, like the halcyon days of Shankar-Jaikishen and Ilayaraja, when you could hear nothing but violins in the songs. Oh the joy!"

Legspinner Harbhajan Singh also commented on this issue, saying this would bring a breath of fresh air into the music industry(despite Bach being an exhumed corpse). He observed, at the same time, that he was an off-spinner and not a legspinner as he had been erroneously called in the previous sentence. He promised, subsequently, to stop bowling those dreadfully easy-to-read doosras which everyone could play and start bowling more off-spinners, which would greatly startle many a batsman, owing to their unpredictability in coming from him.

As of press time, the Times of India writers were wracking their brains over what puns to use in their headline for this issue, since the best ones had already been taken, and had come up with the following:-"Bach with a bang""Bach to the future""Guess who's Bach""Bach in business""He's Bach, baby!!""Come-Bach kid"

and, in an open letter to Simon Cowell of 'American Idol' and adding a touch of Indian history to it,

11 comments:

[Harish] Houdu, the Times must be desperate now, with me having exhausted all their puns.

[Spunky Monkey] THANK you! I couldn't get the name of that movie for the life of me.

I am looking at you in a new light now, though, in the wake of your deep knowledge of Salman Khan starrers. Why is a doctor so knowledgeable about movies of bare-chested men, especially when they are not cadavers?